Module 1 - CaseKNOWLEDGE TRANSFER; PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT; ON-TH.docx

Module 1 - Case
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER; PERFORMANCE
MANAGEMENT; ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
Knowledge Transfer
Many employers do not have a plan to manage and transfer
knowledge. Because workforce dynamics have changed, there is
a greater need than ever for a knowledge-transfer strategy.
Business wisdom is taken from organizations with retirements,
resignations, and terminations, leaving companies more likely
than not to have less growth capacity and less efficiency,
especially in the short run.
In the past, the expectation of passing along knowledge and
leaving a legacy was a good fit with the values of long-tenured
employees who spent their careers with the same company. But
in the modern workplace, where four generations work side by
side, knowledge is not always well-filtered throughout an
organization.
“As the Baby Boom generation of corporate leaders and experts
approaches retirement, businesses in the U.S., Canada, and
many European nations face the loss of experience and
knowledge on an unprecedented scale,” says Diane Piktialis,
Mature Workforce Program Leader at The Conference Board.
“Younger workers can’t be counted on to fill the void, as they
lack the experience that builds deep expertise. They also tend to
change jobs frequently, taking their technological savvy and any
knowledge they’ve gained with them.”
Knowledge does not exist in a vacuum, so it is important to first
identify and evaluate what kind of knowledge company
executives are interested in capturing and sustaining.
Because so much knowledge transfer is cross-generational, from
long-tenured to newer employees, an understanding of different
learning styles based on generation facilitates the process.
Understanding generational learning preferences and adapting

how knowledge is conveyed can make the difference between
merely harvesting knowledge and actually using it.
Adaptations should be made when the knowledge is specific to
the organization and is mission critical, and when the less
knowledgeable employee has specific generational learning
preferences. For example, employees entering the workforce
may prefer getting Instant Messages (IM) in real time rather
than setting a schedule to meet. Gen Y employees may set up
blogs to capture knowledge. Firms considering or using
knowledge transfer processes should assess their readiness for
Instant Messaging, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts, and
virtual reality.
There are many knowledge transfer methods available,
including training seminars, formal education, interviews,
mentoring, apprenticeships, instant messaging, job transfer,
simulations and games, peer assists, communities of practice,
storytelling, wikis, blogs, white papers, and conferences.
Revised from:
American Management Association. (2017). Effective
knowledge transfer can help transform your bottom line.
Retrieved
from http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/Effective-
Knowledge-Transfer-Can-Help-Transform-Your-Bottom-
Line.aspx.
Assignment Overview
Steve Trautman is one of America’s leading knowledge experts.
View the following four videos to understand the depth of the
knowledge-transfer process and follow Mr. Trautman’s widely
used knowledge transfer solution.
Pay close attention to the process. Developing your own
Knowledge Silo Matrix and discussing what you found will be
the basis of your Case 1 assignment.
Trautman, S. (2012, November 30). Introduction to the Steve

Trautman Co. 3 step knowledge transfer process [video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xj1iVhu308
Trautman, S. (2013, January 22). 5 questions that drive
knowledge transfer [video file]. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpag
e&v=IvB_cOo14y8
Trautman, S. (2012, December 19). The Steve Trautman Co. 3-
step knowledge transfer solution with knowledge silo matrix
demo [video file]. Retrieved
e&v=knN-ZzVAmMY
And finally, pulling it all together:
Trautman, S. (2012, December 18). How it works: The Steve
Trautman Co. 3 step knowledge transfer solution [video file].
Retrieved
e&v=tWyMU90x6o4
Case Assignment
1. For this Case Assignment you will be completing and
analyzing a matrix following the Knowledge Silo Matrix
instructions in the third video above. (The team you choose
could be a current or past work group, a group of committee
members, a group of family members, members of a rock band,
or any group where you know the expertise needed and the skill
levels of the employees/members.)
You may (a) complete the matrix by hand or (b) use
the Knowledge Silo Matrix Word form. Remember these key
points:
The Knowledge Silo Matrix (KSM) is a high-level tool of
knowledge silos. Think bigger picture. For example, if you were
filling out a KSM for building a house, some example silos
would be Plumbing, Electrical, Flooring, Insulation, etc. Not
“Weld a pipe” or “Test for adequate water pressure.” The blog

article, Tip for Better, Faster Knowledge Transfer—It's Not
What People KNOW, It's What They Know How to DO,
provided by The Steve Trautman Co., addresses the important
distinction between Knowing vs. Doing. This will help you
create a more actionable KSM.
Once you have your matrix completed, then respond to the
following questions using the section headings in your paper
that are marked in bold below. Utilize at least two sources of
outside information from other authors; be sure to cite them and
provide a reference list at the end.
2. Introduction—This section is often written after you have
completed the rest of your paper.
3. Work Team Overview—Provide an overview of the work
team you have assessed in the Knowledge Silo Matrix. Who are
they, how long have they been in the group, and what are their
jobs?
4. Skill Level in Silo—Discuss each group member’s job in
terms of his/her silo status—discussing why you have evaluated
them as purple, green, yellow, or white.
5. Matrix Analysis—Analyze what the matrix tells you.
a. Look at each silo and analyze what you see and what needs
to be done to minimize the knowledge risk.
b. Look at the colors assigned to each employee (horizontal
colors). What should be done next to minimize the risk related
to each employee as well as to enhance the performance of the
work team? Be sure to discuss the training needed (or not) for
each member and what the format of the training should be
given what you learn from the matrix.
6. Application of the Matrix--Discuss what you have learned
from this exercise and the strengths of the Knowledge Silo
Matrix approach and the challenges you see managers could
face in an organization using the Matrix.
7. Conclusion
Submit BOTH your Knowledge Silo Matrix and your discussion
covering the points above by the module due date.
Assignment Expectations

Your paper will be evaluated using the criteria as stated in the
Case rubric. The following is a review of the rubric criteria:
· Assignment-Driven: Does the paper fully address all aspects
of the assignment? Is the assignment addressed accurately and
precisely using sound logic? Does the paper meet minimum
length requirements?
· Critical Thinking: Does the paper demonstrate graduate-level
analysis, in which information derived from multiple sources,
expert opinions, and assumptions has been critically evaluated
and synthesized in the formulation of a logical set of
conclusions? Does the paper address the topic with sufficient
depth of discussion and analysis?
· Business Writing: Is the essay logical, well organized and well
written? Are the grammar, spelling, and vocabulary appropriate
for graduate-level work? Are section headings included? Are
paraphrasing and synthesis of concepts the primary means of
responding, or is justification/support instead conveyed through
excessive use of direct quotations?
· Effective Use of Information: Does the submission
demonstrate that the student has read, understood, and can apply
the background materials for the module? If required, has the
student demonstrated effective research, as evidenced by
student’s use of relevant and quality (library?) sources? Do
additional sources used provide strong support for conclusions
drawn, and do they help in shaping the overall paper?
· Citing Sources: Does the student demonstrate understanding of
APA Style of referencing by inclusion of proper citations (for
paraphrased text and direct quotations) as appropriate? Have all
sources (e.g., references used from the Background page, the
assignment readings, and outside research) been included, and
are these properly cited? Have all sources cited in the paper
been included on the References page?
Critical Approaches
Few human abilities are more remarkable than the ability to

read and interpret literature. A computer program or a database
can’t perform the complex process of reading and interpreting—
not to mention writing about—a literary text, although
computers can easily exceed human powers of processing codes
and information. Readers follow the sequence of printed words
and as if by magic re-create a scene between characters in a
novel or play, or they respond to the almost inexpressible
emotional effect of a poem’s figurative language. Experienced
readers can pick up on a multitude of literary signals all at
once. With re-reading and some research, readers can draw on
information about the author’s life or the time period when this
work and others like it were first published. Varied and complex
as the approaches to literary criticism may be, they are not
difficult to learn. For the most part, schools of criticism and
theory have developed to address questions that any reader can
begin to answer.
There are essentially three participants in what could be called
the literary exchange or interaction: the text, the source (the
author and other factors that produce the text), and the receiver
(the reader and other aspects of reception). All the varieties of
literary analysis concern themselves with these aspects of the
literary exchange in varying degrees and with varying
emphases. Although each of these elements has a role in any
form of literary analysis, systematic studies of literature and its
history have defined approaches or methods that focus on the
different elements and circumstances of the literary interaction.
The first three sections below—“Emphasis on the Text,”
“Emphasis on the Source,” and “Emphasis on the Receiver”—
describe briefly those schools or modes of literary analysis that
have concentrated on one of the three participants while de-
emphasizing the others. These different emphases, plainly
speaking, are habits of asking different kinds of questions.
Answers or interpretations will vary according to the questions
we ask of a literary work. In practice the range of questions can
be—and to some extent should be—combined whenever we
develop a literary interpretation. Such questions can always

generate the thesis or argument of a critical essay.
Although some approaches to literary analysis treat the literary
exchange (text, source, receiver) in isolation from the world
surrounding that exchange (the world of economics, politics,
religion, cultural tradition, and sexuality—in other words, the
world in which we live), most contemporary modes of analysis
acknowledge the importance of that world to the literary
exchange. These days, even if literary scholars focus primarily
on the text or its source or receiver, they nonetheless often
incorporate some of the observations and methods developed by
theorists and critics who have turned their attention toward the
larger world. We describe the work of such theorists and critics
in the fourth section below, “Historical and Ideological
Criticism.”
Before expanding on the kinds of critical approaches within
these four categories, let’s consider one example in which
questions concerning the text, source, and receiver, as well as a
consideration of historical and ideological questions, would
contribute to a richer interpretation of a text. To begin as usual
with preliminary questions about the text: What is First Fight.
Then Fiddle.? Printed correctly on a separate piece of paper, the
text would tell us at once that it is a poem because of its form:
rhythm, repeating word sounds, lines that leave very wide
margins on the page. Because you are reading this poem in this
book, you know even more about its form. (In this way, the
publication source gives clues about the text.) By putting it in a
section with other poetry, we have told you it is a poem worth
reading, re-reading, and thinking about. (What other ways do
you encounter poems, and what does the medium in which a
poem is presented tell you about it?)
You should pursue other questions focused on the text. What
kind of poem is it? Here we have helped you, especially if you
are not already familiar with the sonnet form, by grouping this
poem with other sonnets (in “The Sonnet: An Album”).
Classifying “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” as a sonnet might then
prompt you to interpret the ways that this poem is or is not like

other sonnets. Well and good: You can check off its fourteen
lines of (basically) iambic pentameter and note its somewhat
unusual rhyme scheme and meter in relation to the rules of
Italian and English sonnets. But why does this experiment with
the sonnet form matter?
To answer questions about the purpose of form, you need to
answer some basic questions about source, such as: When was
this sonnet written and published? Who wrote it? What do you
know about Gwendolyn Brooks, about 1949, about African
American women and/or poets in the United States at that time?
A short historical and biographical contexts essay answering
such questions might help put the “sonnetness” of this poem in
context. But assembling all the available information about the
source and original context of the poem, even some sort of
documented testimony from Brooks about her intentions or
interpretation of it, would still leave room for other questions
leading to new interpretations.
What about the receiver of “First Fight. Then Fiddle.”? Even
within the poem a kind of audience exists. This sonnet seems to
be a set of instructions addressed to “you.” (Although many
sonnets are addressed by a speaker, “I,” to an auditor, “you,”
such address rarely sounds like a series of military commands,
as it does here.) This internal audience is not of course to be
confused with real people responding to the poem, and it is the
latter who are its receivers. How did readers respond to it when
it was first published? Can you find any published reviews, or
any criticism of this sonnet published in studies of Gwendolyn
Brooks?
Questions about the receiver, like those about the author and
other sources, readily connect with questions about historical
and cultural context. Would a reader or someone listening to
this poem read aloud respond differently in the years after
World War II than in an age of global terrorism? Does it make a
difference if the audience addressed by the speaker inside the
poem is imagined as a group of African American men and
women or as a group of European American male commanders?

(The latter question could be regarded as an inquiry involving
the text and the source as well as the receiver.) Does a reader
need to identify with any of the particular groups the poem
fictitiously addresses, or would any reader, from any
background, respond to it the same way? Even the formal
qualities of the text could be examined through historical
lenses: The sonnet form has been associated with prestigious
European literature and with themes of love and mortality since
the Renaissance. It is significant that a twentieth-century
African American poet chose this traditional form to twist
“[t]hreadwise” into a poem about conflict (line 5).
The above are only some of the worthwhile questions that might
help illuminate this short, intricate poem. (We will develop a
few more thoughts about it in illustrating different approaches
to the text and to the source.) Similarly, the complexity of
critical approaches far exceeds our four categories. While a
great deal of worthwhile scholarship and criticism borrows from
a range of theories and methods, below we give necessarily
simplified descriptions of various critical approaches that have
continuing influence. We cannot trace a history of the issues
involved or capture all the complexity of these movements.
Instead think of what follows as a road map to the terrain of
literary analysis. Many available resources describe the entire
landscape of literary analysis in more precise detail. If you are
interested in learning more about these or any other analytical
approaches, consult the works listed in the bibliography at the
end of this chapter.
EMPHASIS ON THE TEXT
This broad category encompasses approaches that de-emphasize
questions about the author/source or the reader/reception in
order to focus on the work itself. In a sense any writing about
literature presupposes recognition of form, in that it deems the
object of study to be a literary work that belongs to a genre or
subgenre of literature, as Brooks’s poem belongs with sonnets.
Moreover, almost all literary criticism notes some details of
style or structure, some intrinsic features such as the relation

between dialogue or narration, or the pattern of rhyme and
meter. But formalist approaches go further by privileging the
design of the text itself above other considerations.
Some formalists, reasonably denying the division of content
from form (since the form is an aspect of the content or
meaning), have more controversially excluded any discussion of
extrinsic or contextual (versus textual) matters such as the
author’s biography or questions of psychology, sociology, or
history. This has led to accusations that formalism, in avoiding
reference to actual authors and readers or to the world of
economic power or social change, also avoids political issues or
commitments. Some historical or ideological critics have
therefore argued that formalism supports the status quo.
Conversely, some formalists charge that any extrinsic—that is,
historical, political, ideological, as well as biographical or
psychological—interpretations of literature threaten to reduce
the text to propaganda. A formalist might maintain that the
inventive wonders of art exceed any practical function it serves.
In practice, influential formalists have generated modes of close
reading that balance attention to form and context, with some
acknowledgment of the political implications of literature. In
the early twenty-first century the formalist methods of close
reading remain influential, especially in classrooms. Indeed,
The Norton Introduction to Literature adheres to these methods
in its presentation of elements and interpretation of form.
New Criticism
One strain of formalism, loosely identified as the New
Criticism, dominated literary studies from approximately the
1920s to the 1970s. New Critics rejected both of the approaches
that then prevailed in the relatively new field of English
studies: the dry analysis of the development of the English
language and the misty-eyed appreciation and evaluation of
“Great Works.” Generally, New Criticism minimizes
consideration of both the source and the receiver, emphasizing
instead the intrinsic qualities of a unified literary work.
Psychological or historical information about the author, the

intentions or feelings of authors and readers, and any
philosophical or socially relevant “messages” derived from the
work all are out-of-bounds in a strict New Critical reading. The
text in a fundamental way refers to itself: Its medium is its
message. Although interested in ambiguity and irony as well as
figurative language, a New Critical reader considers the organic
unity of the unique work. Like an organism, the work develops
in a synergetic relation of parts to whole.
A New Critic might, for example, publish an article titled “A
Reading of ‘First Fight. Then Fiddle.’” (The method works best
with lyric or other short forms because it requires painstaking
attention to details such as metaphors or alliteration.) Little if
anything would be said of Gwendolyn Brooks or the poem’s
relation to Modernist poetry. The critic’s task is to give credit
to the poem, not the poet or the period, and if it is a good poem,
then—implicitly—it can’t be merely “about” World War II or
civil rights. New Criticism presumes that a good literary work
addresses universal human themes and may be interpreted
objectively on many levels. These levels may be related more
by tension and contradiction than harmony, yet that relation
demonstrates the coherence of the whole.
Thus the New Critic’s essay might include some of the
following observations. The poem’s title—which reappears as
half of the first line—consists of a pair of twoword imperative
sentences, and most statements in the poem paraphrase these
two sentences, especially the first of them, “First fight.” Thus
an alliterative twoword command, “Win war” (line 12), follows
a longer version of such a command: “But first to arms, to
armor” (9). Echoes of this sort of exhortation appear
throughout. We, as audience, begin to feel “bewitch[ed],
bewilder[ed]” (4) by a buildup of undesirable urgings, whether
at the beginning of a line (“Be deaf,” 11) or the end of a line
(“Be remote,” 7; “Carry hate,” 9) or in the middle of a line
(“Rise bloody,” 12). It’s hardly what we would want to do. Yet
the speaker makes a strong case for the practical view that a
society needs to take care of defense before it can “devote”

itself to “silks and honey” (6–7), that is, the soft and sweet
pleasures of art. But what kind of culture would place “hate / In
front of [. . .] harmony” and try to ignore “music” and “beauty”
(9–11)? What kind of people are only “remote / A while from
malice and from murdering” (6–7)? A society of warlike heroes
would rally to this speech. Yet on re-reading, many of the words
jar with the tone of heroic battle cry.
The New Critic examines not only the speaker’s style and words
but also the order of ideas and lines in the poem. Ironically, the
poem defies the speaker’s command; it fiddles first, and then
fights, as the octave (first eight lines) concern art, and the sestet
(last six) concern war. The New Critic might be delighted by
the irony that the two segments of the poem in fact unite, in that
their topics—octave on how to fiddle, sestet on how to fight—
mirror each other. The beginning of the poem plays with
metaphors for music and art as means of inflicting “hurting
love” (line 3) or emotional conquest, that is, ways to “fight.”
War and art are both, as far as we know, universal in all human
societies. The poem, then, is an organic whole that explores
timeless concerns.
Later critics have pointed out that New Criticism, despite its
avoidance of extrinsic questions, had a political context of its
own. The insistence on the autonomy of the artwork should be
regarded as a strategy adopted during the Cold War as a
counterbalance to the politicization of art in fascist and
communist regimes. New Criticism also provided a program for
literary reading accessible to beginners regardless of their
social background, which was extremely useful at a time when
more women, minorities, and members of the working class than
ever before were entering college. By the 1970s these same
groups had helped generate two sources of opposition to New
Criticism’s ostensible neutrality and transparency: critical
studies that emphasized the politics of social differences (e.g.,
feminist criticism) and theoretical approaches, based on
linguistics, philosophy, and political theory, that effectively
distanced non-specialists once more.

Structuralism
Whereas New Criticism was largely a British and American
phenomenon, structuralism and its successor, poststructuralism,
derive primarily from French theorists. Each of these
movements was drawn to scientific objectivity and wary of
political commitment. Politics, after all, had inspired the
censorship of science, art, and inquiry throughout centuries and
in recent memory.
Structuralist philosophy, however, was something rather new.
Influenced by the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–
1913), structuralists sought an objective system for studying the
principles of language. Saussure distinguished between
individual uses of language, such as the sentences you or I
might have just spoken or written (parole), and the sets of rules
governing English or any language (langue). Just as a
structuralist linguist would study the interrelations of signs in
the langue rather than the variations in specific utterances in
parole, a structuralist critic of literature or culture would study
shared systems of meaning, such as genres or myths that pass
from one country or period to another, rather than a particular
poem in isolation (the favored subject of New Criticism).
Another structuralist principle derived from Saussure is the
emphasis on the arbitrary association between a word and what
it is said to signify—that is, between the signifier and the
signified. The word horse, for example, has no divine, natural,
or necessary connection to that four-legged, domesticated
mammal, which is named by other combinations of sounds and
letters in other languages. Any language is a network of
relations among such arbitrary signifiers, just as each word in
the dictionary must be defined using other words in that
dictionary. Structuralists largely attribute the meanings of
words to rules of differentiation from other words. Such
differences may be phonetic (as among the words cat and bat
and hat) or they may belong to conceptual associations (as
among the words dinky, puny, tiny, small, miniature, petite,
compact). Structuralist thought has particularly called attention

to the way that opposites or dualisms such as “night” and “day”
or “feminine” and “masculine” define each other through
opposition to each other rather than by direct reference to
objective reality. For example, the earth’s motion around the
sun produces changing exposure to sunlight daily and
seasonally, but by linguistic convention we call it “night”
between, let’s say, 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., no matter how light it is.
(We may differ in opinions about “evening” or “dawn.” But our
“day” at work may begin or end in the dark.) The point is that
arbitrary labels divide what in fact is continuous.
Structuralism’s linguistic insights have greatly influenced
literary studies. Like New Critics, structuralist critics show
little interest in the creative process or in authors, their
intentions, or their circumstances. Similarly, structuralism
discounts the idiosyncrasies of particular readings; it takes texts
to represent interactions of words and ideas that stand apart
from individual human identities or sociopolitical commitments.
Structuralist approaches have applied less to lyric poetry than to
myths, narratives, and cultural practices such as sports or
fashion. Although structuralism tends to affirm a universal
humanity just as New Critics do, its work in comparative
mythology and anthropology challenged the absolute value that
New Criticism tended to grant to time-honored canons of great
literature.
The structuralist would regard a text not as a self-sufficient icon
but as part of a network of conventions. A structuralist essay on
“First Fight. Then Fiddle.” might ask why the string is plied
with the “feathery sorcery” (line 2) of the “bow” (7). These
words suggest the art of a Native American trickster or
primitive sorcerer, while at the same time the instrument is a
disguised weapon: a stringed bow with feathered arrows (the
term “muzzle” is a similar pun, suggesting an animal’s snout
and the discharging end of a gun). Or is the fiddle—a violin
played in musical forms such as bluegrass—a metaphor for
popular art or folk resistance to official culture? In many
folktales a hero is taught to play the fiddle by the devil or tricks

the devil with a fiddle or similar instrument. Further, a
structuralist reading might attach great significance to the
sonnet form as a paradigm that has shaped poetic expression for
centuries. The classic “turn” or reversal of thought in a sonnet
may imitate the form of many narratives of departure and
return, separation and reconciliation. Brooks’s poem repeats in
the numerous short reversing imperatives, as well as in the
structure of octave versus sestet, the eternal oscillation between
love and death, creation and destruction.
Poststructuralism
By emphasizing the paradoxes of dualisms and the ways that
language constructs our awareness, structuralism planted the
seeds of its own destruction or, rather, deconstruction. Dualisms
(e.g., masculine/feminine, mind/body, culture/nature) cannot be
separate but equal; rather, they take effect as differences of
power in which one dominates the other. Yet as the German
philosopher of history Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–
1831) insisted, the relations of the dominant and subordinate, of
master and slave, readily invert themselves. The master is
dominated by his need for the slave’s subordination; the
possession of subordinates defines his mastery. As Brooks’s
poem implies, each society reflects its own identity through an
opposing “they,” in a dualism of civilized/barbaric. The
instability of the speaker’s position in this poem (is he or she
among the conquerors or the conquered?) is a model of the
instability of roles throughout the human world. There is no
transcendent ground—except on another planet, perhaps—from
which to measure the relative positions of the polar opposites
on earth. Roland Barthes (1915–80) and others, influenced by
the radical movements of the 1960s and the increasing
complexity of culture in an era of mass consumerism and global
media, extended structuralism into more profoundly relativist
perspectives.
Poststructuralism is the broad term used to designate the
philosophical position that attacks the objective, universalizing
claims of most fields of knowledge since the eighteenth century.

Poststructuralists, distrusting the optimism of a positivist
philosophy that suggests the world is knowable and explicable,
ultimately doubt the possibility of certainties of any kind, since
language signifies only through a chain of other words rather
than through any fundamental link to reality. This argument
derives from structuralism, yet it also criticizes structuralist
universalism and avoidance of political issues. Ideology is a key
conceptual ingredient in the poststructuralist argument against
structuralism. Ideology is a slippery term that can broadly be
defined as a socially shared set of ideas that shape behavior;
often it refers to the values that legitimate the ruling interests in
a society, and in many accounts it is the hidden code that is
officially denied. (We discuss kinds of “ideological” criticism
later.) Poststructuralist theory has played a part in a number of
critical schools introduced below, not all of them focused on the
text. But in literary criticism, poststructuralism has marshaled
most forces under the banner of deconstruction.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction insists on the logical impossibility of knowledge
that is not influenced or biased by the words used to express it.
Deconstruction also claims that language is incapable of
representing any sort of reality directly. As practiced by its
most famous proponent, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida
(1930–2004), deconstruction endeavors to trace the way texts
imply the contradiction of their explicit meanings. The
deconstructionist delights in the sense of dizziness as the
grounds of conviction crumble away; aporia, or irresolvable
doubt, is the desired, if fleeting, end of an encounter with a
text. Deconstruction threatens humanism, or the worldview that
is centered on human values and the self-sufficient individual,
because it denies that there is an ultimate, solid reality on which
to base truth or the identity of the self. All values and identities
are constructed by the competing systems of meaning, or
discourses. This is a remarkably influential set of ideas that you
will meet again as we discuss other approaches.
The traditional concept of the author as creative origin of the

text comes under fire in deconstructionist criticism, which
emphasizes instead both the creative power of language or the
text and the ingenious work of the critic in detecting gaps and
contradictions in writing. Thus, like New Criticism,
deconstruction disregards the author and concentrates on textual
close reading, but unlike New Criticism, it emphasizes the role
of the reader as well. Moreover, the text need not be respected
as a pure and coherent icon. Deconstructionists might “read”
many kinds of writing and representation in other media in
much the same way that they might read John Milton’s Paradise
Lost—that is, irreverently. Indeed, when deconstruction erupted
in university departments of literature, traditional critics and
scholars feared the breakdown of the distinctions between
literature and criticism and between literature and many other
kinds of texts. Many attacks on literary theory have particularly
lambasted deconstructionists for apparently rejecting all the
reasons to care about literature in the first place and for writing
in a style so flamboyantly obscure that no one but specialists
can understand. Yet in practice Derrida and others have carried
harmony before them, to paraphrase Brooks; their readings can
delight in the play of figurative language, thereby enhancing
rather than debunking the value of literature.
A deconstructionist might read “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” in a
manner somewhat similar to the New Critic’s, but with even
more focus on puns and paradoxes and on the poem’s resistance
to organic unity. For instance, the two alliterative commands,
“fight” and “fiddle,” might be opposites, twins, or inseparable
consequences of each other. The word “fiddle” is tricky. Does it
suggest that art is trivial? Does it allude to a dictator who
“fiddles while Rome burns,” as the saying goes? Someone who
“fiddles” is not performing a grand, honest, or even competent
act: One fiddles with a hobby, with the account books, with car
keys in the dark. The artist in this poem defies the orthodoxy of
the sonnet form, instead making a kind of harlequin patchwork
out of different traditions, breaking the rhythm, intermixing
endearments and assaults.

To the deconstructionist the recurring broken antitheses of war
and art, art and war cancel each other out. The very metaphors
undermine the speaker’s summons to war. The command “Be
deaf to music and to beauty blind” (line 11), which takes the
form of a chiasmus, or X-shaped sequence (adjective, noun;
noun, adjective), is a kind of miniature version of this chiasmic
poem. (We are supposed to follow a sequence, fight then fiddle,
but instead reverse that by imagining ways to do violence with
art or to create beauty through destruction.) The poem, a lyric
written but imagined as spoken or sung, puts the senses and the
arts under erasure; we are somehow not to hear music (by
definition audible), not to see beauty (here a visual attribute).
“Maybe not too late” comes rather too late: At the end of the
poem it will be too late to start over, although “having first to
civilize a space / Wherein to play your violin with grace” comes
across as a kind of beginning (12–14). These comforting lines
form the only heroic couplet in the poem, the only two lines that
run smoothly from end to end. (All the other lines have
caesuras, enjambments, or balanced pairs of concepts, as in
“from malice and from murdering” [8].) But the violence behind
“civilize,” the switch to the high-art term “violin,” and the use
of the Christian term “grace” suggest that the pagan erotic art
promised at the outset, the “sorcery” of “hurting love” that can
“bewitch,” will be suppressed.
Like other formalisms, deconstruction can appear apolitical
or conservative because of its skepticism about the referential
connection between literature and the larger world. Yet
poststructuralist linguistics provides a theory of difference that
clearly pertains to the rankings of status and power in society,
as in earlier examples of masculine/feminine, master/slave. The
Other, the negative of the norm, is always less than an equal
counterpart. Deconstruction has been a tool for various
poststructuralist thinkers including the historian Michel
Foucault (1926–84), the feminist theorist and psychoanalyst
Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), and the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques
Lacan (1901–81).

Narrative Theory
Before concluding the discussion of text-centered approaches,
we should mention the schools of narratology and narrative
theory that have shaped study of the novel and other kinds of
narrative. Criticism of fiction has been in a boom period since
the 1950s, but the varieties of narrative theory per se have had
more limited effect than the approaches we have discussed
above. Since the 1960s different analysts of the forms and
techniques of narrative, most notably the Chicago formalists
and the structuralist narratologists, have developed terminology
for the various interactions of author, implied author, narrator,
and characters; of plot and the treatment of time in the selection
and sequence of scenes; of voice, point of view, or focus and
other aspects of fiction. As formalisms, narrative theories tend
to ignore the author’s biography, individual reader response,
and the historical context of the work or its actual reception.
Narratology began by presenting itself as a structuralist science;
its branches have grown from psychoanalytic theory or extended
to reader-response criticism. In recent decades studies of
narrative technique and form have responded to Marxist,
feminist, and other ideological criticism that insists on the
political contexts of literature. One important influence on this
shift has been the revival of the work of the Russian literary
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), which considers the
novel as a dialogic form that pulls together the many discourses
and voices of a culture and its history. Part of the appeal of
Bakhtin’s work has been the fusion of textual close reading with
attention to material factors such as economics and class and a
sense of the open-endedness and contradictoriness of writing (in
the spirit of deconstruction more than of New Criticism). Like
other Marxist-trained European formalists, Bakhtin sought to
understand the complex literary modes of communication in the
light of politics and history.
EMPHASIS ON THE SOURCE
As the examples above suggest, a great deal can be drawn from
a text without referring to its source or author. For millennia

many anonymous works were shared in oral or manuscript form,
and even after printing spread in Europe few thought it
necessary to know the author’s name or anything about him or
her. Yet criticism from its beginnings in ancient Greece has
nonetheless been interested in the designing intention “behind”
the text. Even when no evidence remained about the author, a
legendary personality has sometimes been invented to satisfy
readers’ curiosity. From the legend of blind Homer to the latest
debates about who “really” wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays,
literary criticism has entailed interest in the author.
Biographical Criticism
This approach reached its height in an era when humanism
prevailed in literary studies (roughly the 1750s to the 1960s).
At this time there was widely shared confidence in the ideas
that art and literature were the direct expressions of the artist’s
or writer’s genius and that criticism of great works supported
veneration of the great persons who created them. The lives of
some famous writers became the models that aspiring writers
emulated. Criticism at times was skewed by social judgments,
as when John Keats was put down as a “Cockney” poet—that is,
Londonbred and lower-class. Women or minorities have at times
used pseudonyms or published anonymously to avoid having
their work judged only in terms of expectations, negative or
positive, of what a woman or person of color might write.
Biographical criticism can be diminishing in this respect. Others
have objected to reading literature as a reflection of the author’s
personality. Such critics have supported the idea that the
highest literary art is pure form, untouched by gossip or
personal emotion. In this spirit some early-twentieth-century
critics as well as Modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, James
Joyce, and Virginia Woolf tried to dissociate the text from the
personality or political commitments of the author. (The
theories of these writers and their actual practices did not
always coincide.)
In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic criticism
interpreted the text in light of the author’s emotional conflicts,

while other interpretations relied heavily on the author’s stated
intentions. (Although psychoanalytic criticism entails more than
analysis of the author, we will introduce it as an approach that
primarily concerns the human source[s] of literature; it usually
has less to say about the form and receiver of the text.) Author-
based readings can be reductive. All the accessible information
about a writer’s life cannot definitively explain the writings. As
a young man D. H. Lawrence might have hated his father and
loved his mother, but all men who hate their fathers and love
their mothers do not write fiction as powerful as Lawrence’s.
Indeed, Lawrence himself cautioned that we should “trust the
tale, not the teller.”
Any kind of criticism benefits to some extent, however, from
drawing on knowledge of the writer’s life and career. Certain
critical approaches, devoted to recognition of separate literary
traditions, make sense only in light of supporting biographical
evidence. Studies that concern traditions such as Irish literature,
Asian American literature, or literature by Southern women
require reliable information about the writers’ birth and
upbringing and even some judgment of the writers’ intentions to
write as members of such traditions. (We discuss feminist,
African American, and other studies of distinct literatures in the
“Historical and Ideological Criticism” section that follows,
although such studies recognize the biographical “source” as a
starting point.)
A reading of “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” can become rather
different when we know more about Gwendolyn Brooks. An
African American, she was raised in Chicago in the 1920s.
These facts begin to provide a context for her work. Some of the
biographical information has more to do with her time and place
than with her race and sex. Brooks began in the 1940s to
associate with Harriet Monroe’s magazine, Poetry, which had
been influential in promoting Modernist poetry. Brooks early
received acclaim for books of poetry that depict the everyday
lives of poor, urban African Americans; in 1950 she was the
first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1967 she

became an outspoken advocate for the Black Arts movement,
which promoted a separate tradition rather than integration into
the aesthetic mainstream. But even before this political
commitment, her work never sought to “pass” or to distance
itself from the reality of racial difference, nor did it become any
less concerned with poetic tradition and form when she
published it through small, independent black presses in her
“political” phase.
It is reasonable, then, to read “First Fight. Then Fiddle,”
published in 1949, in relation to the role of a racial outsider
mastering and adapting the forms of a dominant tradition.
Perhaps Brooks’s speaker addresses an African American
audience in the voice of a revolutionary, calling for violence to
gain the right to express African American culture. Perhaps the
lines “the music that they wrote / Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to
sing / Threadwise” (lines 3–5) suggest the way that the
colonized may transform the empire’s music rather than the
other way around. Ten years before the poem was published, a
famous African American singer, Marian Anderson, had more
than “[q]ualif[ied] to sing” opera and classical concert music,
but had still encountered the color barrier in the United States.
Honored throughout Europe as the greatest living contralto,
Anderson was barred in 1939 from performing at Constitution
Hall in Washington, D.C., because of her race. Instead she
performed at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday to an
audience of seventy-five thousand people. It was not easy to
find a “space” in which to practice her art. Such a contextual
reference, whether or not intended, relates biographically to
Brooks’s role as an African American woman wisely reweaving
classical traditions “[t]hreadwise” rather than straining them
into “hempen” ropes (5). Beneath the manifest reference to the
recent world war, this poem refers to the segregation of the arts
in America. (Questions of source and historical context often
interrelate.)
Besides readings that derive from biographical and historical
information, there are still other ways to read aspects of the

source rather than the text or the receiver. The source of the
work extends beyond the life of the person who wrote it to
include not only the writer’s other works but also the
circumstances of contemporary publishing; contemporary
literary movements; the history of the composition, editing, and
publication of this particular text, with all the variations; and so
on. While entire schools of literary scholarship have been
devoted to each of these matters, any analyst of a particular
work should bear in mind what is known about the
circumstances of writers at a given time, the material conditions
of the work’s first publication, and the means of dissemination
ever since. It makes a difference in our interpretation to know
that a certain sonnet circulated in manuscript among a small
courtly audience or that a particular novel was serialized in a
weekly journal cheap enough for the masses to read it.
Psychoanalytic Criticism
With the development of psychology and psychoanalysis toward
the end of the nineteenth century, many critics were tempted to
apply psychological theories to literary analysis. Symbolism,
dreamlike imagery, emotional rather than rational logic, and a
pleasure in language all suggested that literature profoundly
evoked a mental and emotional landscape, often one of disorder
or abnormality. From mad poets to patients speaking in verse,
imaginative literature might be regarded as a representation of
shared irrational structures within all psyches (i.e., souls) or
selves. While psychoanalytic approaches have developed along
with structuralism and poststructuralist linguistics and
philosophy, they rarely focus on textual form. Rather, they
attribute latent or hidden meaning to unacknowledged desires in
some person, usually the author or source behind the character
in a narrative or drama. A psychoanalytic critic can also focus
on the response of readers and, in recent decades, usually
accepts the influence of changing social history on the
structures of sexual desire represented in the work.
Nevertheless, psychoanalysis has typically aspired to a
universal, unchanging theory of the mind and personality, and

criticism that applies it has tended to emphasize the authorial
source.
FREUDIAN CRITICISM
For most of the twentieth century, the dominant school of
psychoanalytic criticism was the Freudian, based on the work of
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Many of its practitioners assert
that the meaning of a literary work exists not on its surface but
in the psyche (some would even claim in the neuroses) of the
author. Classic psychoanalytic criticism read works as though
they were the recorded dreams of patients; interpreted the life
histories of authors as keys to the works; or analyzed characters
as though they, like real people, have a set of repressed
childhood memories. (In fact, many novels and most plays leave
out information about characters’ development from infancy
through adolescence, the period that psychoanalysis especially
strives to reconstruct.)
A well-known Freudian reading of Hamlet, for example, insists
that Hamlet suffers from an Oedipus complex, a Freudian term
for a group of repressed desires and memories that corresponds
with the Greek myth that is the basis of Sophocles’s play
Oedipus the King. In this view Hamlet envies his uncle because
he unconsciously wants to sleep with his mother, who was the
first object of his desire as a baby. The ghost of Hamlet Sr. may
then be a manifestation of Hamlet’s unconscious desire or of his
guilt over wanting to kill his father, the person who has a right
to the desired mother’s body. Hamlet’s madness is not just
acting but the result of this frustrated desire; his cruel
mistreatment of Ophelia is a deflection of his disgust at his
mother’s being “unfaithful” to him. Some Freudian critics stress
the author’s psyche and so might read Hamlet as the expression
of Shakespeare’s own Oedipus complex. In another mode
psychoanalytic critics, reading imaginative literature as
symbolic fulfillment of unconscious wishes much as
psychoanalysts read dreams, look for objects, spaces, or actions
that appear to relate to sexual anatomy or activity. Much as if
tracing out the extended metaphors of an erotic poem by John

Donne or a blues or Motown lyric, the Freudian reads
containers, empty spaces, or bodies of water as female; tools,
weapons, towers or trees, trains or planes as male.
JUNGIAN AND MYTH CRITICISM
Just as a Freudian assumes that all human psyches have similar
histories and structures, the Jungian critic assumes that we all
share a universal or collective unconscious (just as each of us
has an individual unconscious). According to Carl Gustav Jung
(1875–1961) and his followers, the unconscious harbors
universal patterns and forms of human experiences, or
archetypes. We can never know these archetypes directly, but
they surface in art in an imperfect, shadowy way, taking the
form of literary archetypes—the snake with its tail in its mouth,
rebirth, the mother, the double or doppelgänger, the descent into
hell. In the classic quest narrative, the hero struggles to free
himself (the gender of the pronoun is significant) from the
Great Mother to become a separate, self-sufficient being
(combating a demonic antagonist), surviving trials to gain the
reward of union with his ideal other, the feminine anima. In a
related school of archetypal criticism, influenced by Northrop
Frye (1912–91), the prevailing myth follows a seasonal cycle of
death and rebirth. Frye proposed a system for literary criticism
that classified all literary forms according to a cycle of genres
associated with the phases of human experience from birth to
death and the natural cycle of seasons (e.g., spring/romance).
These approaches have been useful in the study of folklore and
early literatures as well as in comparative studies of various
national literatures. While most myth critics focus on the hero’s
quest, there have been forays into feminist archetypal criticism.
These emphasize variations on the myths of Isis and Demeter,
goddesses of fertility or seasonal renewal, who take different
forms to restore either the sacrificed woman (Persephone’s
season in the underworld) or the sacrificed man (Isis’s search
for Osiris and her rescue of their son, Horus). Many twentieth-
century poets were drawn to the heritage of archetypes and
myths. Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, for example,

self-consciously rewrites a number of gendered archetypes, with
a female protagonist on a quest into a submerged world.
Most critics today, influenced by poststructuralism, have
become wary of universal patterns. Like structuralists, Jungians
and archetypal critics strive to compare and unite the ages and
peoples of the world and to reveal fundamental truths. Rich, as
a feminist poet, suggests that the “book of myths” is an eclectic
anthology that needs to be revised. Claims of universality tend
to obscure the detailed differences among cultures and often
appeal to some idea of biological determinism. Such
determinism diminishes the power of individuals to design
alternative life patterns and even implies that no literature can
really surprise us.
LACANIAN CRITICISM
As it has absorbed the indeterminacies of poststructuralism
under the influence of thinkers such as Jacques Lacan (1901–
81) and Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), psychological criticism has
become increasingly complex. Few critics today are direct
Freudian analysts of authors or texts, and few maintain that
universal archetypes explain the meaning of a tree or water in a
text. Yet psychoanalytic theory continues to inform many
varieties of criticism, and most new work in this field is
affiliated with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan’s theory unites
poststructuralist linguistics with Freudian theory. The Lacanian
critic, like a deconstructionist, perceives the text as defying
conscious authorial control, foregrounding the powerful
interpretation of the critic rather than the author or any other
reader. Accepting the Oedipal paradigm and the unconscious as
the realm of repressed desire, Lacanian theory aligns the
development and structure of the individual human subject with
the development and structure of language. To simplify a
purposefully dense theory: The very young infant inhabits the
Imaginary, in a preverbal, undifferentiated phase dominated by
a sense of union with the Mother. Recognition of identity begins
with the Mirror Stage, ironically with a disruption of a sense of
oneness. For when one first looks into a mirror, one begins to

recognize a split or difference between one’s body and the
image in the mirror. This splitting prefigures a sense that the
object of desire is Other and distinct from the subject. With
difference or the splitting of subject and object comes language
and entry into the Symbolic Order, since we use words to
summon the absent object of desire (as a child would cry
“Mama” to bring her back). But what language signifies most is
the lack of that object. The imaginary, perfectly nurturing
Mother would never need to be called.
As in the biblical Genesis, the Lacanian “genesis” of the subject
tells of a loss of paradise through knowledge of the difference
between subject and object or Man and Woman (eating of the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil leads to the sense of
shame that teaches Adam and Eve to hide their nakedness). In
Lacanian theory the Father governs language or the Symbolic
Order; the Word spells the end of a child’s sense of oneness
with the Mother. Further, the Father’s power claims
omnipotence, the possession of male prerogative symbolized by
the Phallus, which is not the anatomical difference between men
and women but the idea or construction of that difference. Thus
it is language or culture rather than nature that generates the
difference and inequality between the sexes. Some feminist
theorists have adopted aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory, particularly the concept of the gaze. This concept notes
that the masculine subject is the one who looks, whereas the
feminine object is to be looked at.
Another influential concept is abjection. The Franco-Bulgarian
psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection most simply
reimagines the infant’s blissful sense of union with the mother
and the darker side of that possible union. To return to the
mother’s body would be death, as metaphorically we are buried
in Mother Earth. Yet according to the theory, people both desire
and dread such loss of boundaries. A sense of self or
subjectivity and hence of independence and power depends on
resisting abjection. The association of the maternal body with
abjection or with the powerlessness symbolized by the female’s

Lack of the Phallus can help explain negative cultural images of
women. Many narrative genres seem to split the images of
women between an angelic and a witchlike type. Lacanian or
Kristevan theory has been well adapted to film criticism and to
fantasy and other popular forms favored by structuralism or
archetypal criticism.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism today—as distinct from
specialized discussion of Lacanian theory, for example—treads
more lightly than in the past. In James Joyce’s Araby, a young
Dublin boy, orphaned and raised by an aunt and uncle, likes to
haunt a back room in the house; there the “former tenant, [. . .]
a priest, had died” (par. 2). (Disused rooms at the margins of
houses resemble the unconscious, and a dead celibate “father”
suggests a kind of failure of the Law, conscience, or in Freudian
terms, superego.) The priest had left behind a “rusty bicycle-
pump” in the “wild garden” with “a central apple tree” (these
echoes of the garden of Eden suggesting the impotence of
Catholic religious symbolism). The boy seems to gain
consciousness of a separate self by gazing upon an idealized
female object, Mangan’s sister, whose “name was like a
summons to all my foolish blood” (par. 4). Though he secretly
watches and follows her, she is not so much a sexual fantasy as
a beautiful art object (par. 9). He retreats to the back room to
think of her in a kind of ecstasy that resembles masturbation.
Yet it is not masturbation: It is preadolescent, dispersed through
all orifices—the rain feels like “incessant needles [. . .] playing
in the sodden beds”; and it is sublimated, that is, repressed and
redirected into artistic or religious forms rather than directly
expressed by bodily pleasure: “All my senses seemed to desire
to veil themselves” (par. 6).
It is not in the back room but on the street that the girl finally
speaks to the hero, charging him to go on a quest to Araby.
After several trials, the hero, carrying the talisman, arrives in a
darkened hall “girdled at half its height by a gallery,” an
underworld or maternal space that is also a deserted temple
(par. 25). The story ends without his grasping the prize to carry

back, the “chalice” or holy grail (symbolic of female sexuality)
that he had once thought to bear “safely through a throng of
foes” (par. 5).
Such a reading seems likely to raise objections that it is
overreading: You’re seeing too much in it; the author didn’t
mean that. This has been a popular reaction to psychoanalysis
for over a hundred years, but it is only a heightened version of a
response to many kinds of criticism. This sample reading pays
close attention to the text, but does not really follow a formal
approach because its goal is to explain the psychological
implications or resonance of the story’s details. We have
mentioned nothing about the author, though we could have used
this reading to forward a psychoanalytic reading of Joyce’s
biography.
EMPHASIS ON THE RECEIVER
In some sense critical schools develop in reaction to the
perceived excesses of earlier critical schools. By the 1970s, in a
time of political upheaval that placed a high value on individual
expression, a number of critics felt that the various routes
toward objective criticism had proved to be dead ends. New
Critics, structuralists, and psychoanalytic or myth critics had
sought objective, scientific systems that disregarded changing
times, political issues, or the reader’s personal response. New
Critics and other formalists tended to value a literary canon
made up of works that were regarded as complete, unchanging
objects to be interpreted according to ostensibly timeless
standards.
Reader-Response Criticism
Among critics who challenge New Critical assumptions, reader-
response critics regard the work not as what is printed on the
page but as what is experienced, even created through each act
of reading. According to such critics, the reader effectively
performs the text into existence the way a musician creates
music from a score. Reader-response critics ask not what a work
means but what a work does to and through a reader. Literary
texts leave gaps that experienced readers fill according to

expectations or conventions. Individual readers differ, of
course, and gaps in a text provide space for different
interpretations. Some of these lacunae are temporary—such as
the withholding of the murderer’s name until the end of a
mystery novel—and are closed by the text sooner or later,
though each reader will in the meantime fill them differently.
But other lacunae are permanent and can never be filled with
certainty; they result in a degree of indeterminacy in the text.
The reader-response critic observes the expectations aroused by
a text; how they are satisfied or modified; and how the reader
comprehends the work when all of it has been read, and when it
is re-read. Such criticism attends to the reading habits
associated with different genres and to the shared assumptions
that, in a particular cultural context, help to determine how
readers fill in gaps in the text.
The role of the reader or receiver in the literary exchange has
also been studied from a political perspective. Literature helps
shape social identity, and social status shapes access to
different kinds of literature. Feminist critics adapted
readerresponse criticism, for example, to note that girls often do
not identify with many American literary classics as boys do,
and thus girls do not simply accept the stereotype of women as
angels, temptresses, or scolds who should be abandoned for the
sake of all-male adventures. Studies of African American
literature and other ethnic literatures have often featured
discussion of literacy and of the obstacles for readers who
either cannot find their counterparts within literary texts or
there encounter negative stereotypes of their group. Thus, as we
will discuss below, most forms of historical and ideological
criticism include some consideration of the reader.
Reception Studies
Where reader-response critics tend to analyze the experience of
a hypothetical reader of one sort or another, reception studies
instead explores how texts have been received by actual readers
and how literacy and reading have themselves evolved over
time. A critic in this school might examine documents ranging

from contemporary reviews to critical essays written across the
generations since the work was first published or diaries and
other documents in which readers describe their encounters with
particular works. Just as there are histories of publishing and of
the book, there are histories of literacy and reading practices.
Poetry, fiction, and drama often directly represent the theme of
reading as well as writing. Many published works over the
centuries have debated the benefits and perils of reading works
such as sermons or novels. Different genres and particular
works construct different classes or kinds of readers in the way
they address them or supply what they are supposed to want.
Some scholars have found quantitative measures for reading,
from sales and library lending rates to questionnaires.
HISTORICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM
The approaches to the text, the author, and the reader outlined
above may each take some note of historical contexts, including
changes in formal conventions, the writer’s milieu, or audience
expectations. In the nineteenth century, historical criticism took
the obvious facts that a work is created in a specific historical
and cultural context and that the author is a part of that context
as reasons to treat literature as a reflection of society and its
history. Twentieth-century formalists rejected this reflectivist
model of art—that is, the assumption that literature and other
arts straightforwardly represent, as in a mirror, the collective
spirit of a society at a given time. But as we have remarked, the
formalist tendency to isolate the work of art from social and
historical context met resistance in the last decades of the
twentieth century. The new historical approaches that developed
out of that resistance replace the reflectivist model with a
constructivist model, whereby literature and other cultural
discourses are seen to help construct social relations and roles
rather than merely reflect them. A society’s ideology, its system
of representations (ideas, myths, images), is inscribed in
literature and other cultural forms, which in turn help shape
identities and social practices.
From the 1980s until quite recently, historical approaches have

dominated literary studies. Some such approaches have been
insistently materialist—that is, seeking causes more in concrete
conditions such as technology, production, and distribution of
wealth. Such criticism usually owes an acknowledged debt to
Marxism, the large and complex body of concepts and theories
built on the work of Karl Marx (1818–83). Other historical
approaches have been influenced to a degree by Marxist critics
and cultural theorists, but work within the realm of ideology,
textual production, and interpretation, using some of the
methods and concerns of traditional literary history. Still others
emerge from the civil rights movement and the struggles for
recognition of women and racial, ethnic, and sexual
constituencies.
Feminist studies, African American studies, gay and lesbian
studies, and studies of the cultures of different immigrant and
ethnic populations within and beyond the United States have
each developed along similar theoretical lines. These schools,
like Marxist criticism, adopt a constructivist position:
Literature, they argue, is not simply a reflection of prejudices
and norms; it also helps define social norms and identities, such
as what it means to be an African American woman. Each of
these schools has moved through stages of first claiming
equality with the literature dominated by white Anglo American
men, then affirming the difference or distinctiveness of their
own separate culture, and then theoretically questioning the
terms and standards of such comparisons. At a certain point in
its development, each group rejects essentialism, the notion of
innate or biological bases for differentiating sexes, races, or
other groups. This rejection of essentialism is usually called the
constructivist position, in a somewhat different but related
sense to our definition above. Constructivism maintains that
identity is socially formed rather than biologically determined.
Differences of anatomical sex, skin color, first language,
parental ethnicity, and eventual sexual preferences have great
impact on how one is classified, brought up, and treated
socially, and on one’s subjectivity or sense of identity.

Constructivists maintain that these differences, however, are
constructed more by ideology and the resulting behaviors than
by any natural programming.
Marxist Criticism
The most insistent and vigorous historical approach through the
twentieth century to the present has been Marxism. With roots
in nineteenth-century historicism, Marxist criticism was
initially reflectivist. Economics, the underlying cause of
history, was thus considered the base; and culture, including
literature and the other arts, was regarded as the superstructure,
an outcome or reflection of the base. Viewed from this simple
Marxist perspective, the literary works of a period are
economically determined; they reflect the state of the struggle
between classes in as particular place and time. History enact
recurrent three-step cycles, a pattern that Hegel had defined as
dialectic (Hegel was cited above on the interdependence of
master and slave). Each socioeconomic phase, or thesis, is
counteracted by its antithesis, and the resulting conflict yields a
synthesis, which becomes the ensuing thesis, and so on. As with
early Freudian criticism, early Marxist criticism was often
preoccupied with labeling and exposing illusions or deceptions.
A novel might be read as a thinly disguised defense of the
power of bourgeois industrial capital; its appeal on behalf of the
suffering poor might be dismissed as an effort to fend off class
rebellion.
As a rationale for state control of the arts, Marxism was abused
in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states. In the hands of
sophisticated critics, however, Marxism has been richly
rewarding. Various schools that unite formal close reading and
political analysis developed in the early twentieth century under
Soviet communism and under fascism in Europe, often in covert
resistance. These schools in turn have influenced critical
movements in North America; New Criticism, structuralist
linguistics, deconstruction, and narrative theory have each
borrowed from European Marxist critics.
Most recently, a new mode of Marxist theory has developed,

largely guided by the thinking of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
and Theodor Adorno (1903–69) of the Frankfurt School in
Germany, Louis Althusser (1918–90) in France, and Raymond
Williams (1921–88) in Britain. This work has generally tended
to modify the base/superstructure distinction and to interrelate
public and private life, economics and culture. Newer Marxist
(or so-called Marxian) interpretation assumes that the relation
of a literary work to its historical context is overdetermined—
the relation has multiple determining factors rather than a sole
cause or aim. This thinking similarly acknowledges that neither
the source nor the receiver of the literary interaction is a mere
tool or victim of the ruling powers or state. Representation of
all kinds, including literature, always has a political dimension,
according to this approach; conversely, political and material
conditions such as work, money, or institutions depend on
representation.
Showing some influence of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist
theories, recent Marxist literary studies examine the effects of
ideology by focusing on the works’ gaps and silences: Ideology
may be conveyed in what is repressed or contradicted. In many
ways, Marxist criticism has adapted to the conditions of
consumer rather than industrial capitalism and to global rather
than national economies. The worldwide revolution that was to
come when the proletariat or working classes overthrew the
capitalists has never taken place; in many countries industrial
labor has been swallowed up by the service sector, and workers
reject the political Left that would seem their most likely ally.
Increasingly, Marxist criticism has acknowledged that the
audience of literature may be active rather than passive, just as
the text and source may be more than straightforward
instructions for toeing a given political line. Marxist criticism
has been especially successful with the novel, since that genre
more than drama or short fiction is capable of representing
numerous people from different classes as they develop over
long periods of time.
Feminist Criticism

Like Marxist criticism and the schools discussed below,
feminist criticism derives from a critique of a history of
oppression, in this case the history of women’s inequality.
Feminist criticism has no single founder like Freud or Marx; it
has been practiced to some extent since the 1790s, when praise
of women’s cultural achievements went hand in hand with
arguments that women were rational beings deserving equal
rights and education. Modern feminist criticism emerged from a
“second wave” of feminist activism, in the 1960s and 1970s,
associated with the civil rights and antiwar movements. One of
the first disciplines in which women’s activism took root was
literary criticism, but feminist theory and women’s studies
quickly became recognized methods across the disciplines.
Feminist literary studies began by denouncing the
misrepresentation of women in literature and affirming the
importance of women’s writings, before quickly adopting the
insights of poststructuralist theory; yet the early strategies
continue to have their use. At first, feminist criticism in the
1970s, like early Marxist criticism, regarded literature as a
reflection of patriarchal society’s sexist base; the demeaning
images of women in literature were symptoms of a system that
had to be overthrown. Feminist literary studies soon began,
however, to claim the equal but distinctive qualities of writings
by women. Critics such as Elaine Showalter (b. 1941),
Sandra M. Gilbert (b. 1936), and Susan Gubar (b. 1944)
explored canonical works by women, relying on close reading
with some aid from historical and psychoanalytic methods.
By the 1980s it was widely recognized that a New Critical
method would leave most of the male-dominated canon intact
and most women writers still in obscurity, because many women
had written in different genres and styles, on different themes,
and for different audiences than had male writers. To affirm the
difference or distinctiveness of female literary traditions, some
feminist studies championed what they hailed as women’s
innate or universal affinity for fluidity and cycle rather than
solidity and linear progress. Others concentrated on the role of

the mother in human psychological development. According to
this argument, girls, not having to adopt a gender role different
from that of their first object of desire, the mother, grow up
with less rigid boundaries of self and a relational rather than
judgmental ethic.
The dangers of such essentialist generalizations soon became
apparent. If women’s differences from men were biologically
determined or due to universal archetypes, there was no solution
to women’s oppression, which many cultures had justified in
terms of biological reproduction or archetypes of nature. At this
point in the debate, feminist literary studies intersected with
poststructuralist linguistic theory in questioning the terms and
standards of comparison. French feminist theory, articulated
most prominently by Hélène Cixous (b. 1937) and Luce Irigaray
(b. 1932?), deconstructed the supposed archetypes of gender
written into the founding discourses of Western culture. We
have seen that deconstruction helps expose the power imbalance
in every dualism. Thus man is to woman as culture is to nature
or mind is to body, and in each case the second term is held to
be inferior or Other. The language and hence the worldview and
social formations of our culture, not nature or eternal
archetypes, constructed woman as Other. This insight was
helpful in challenging essentialism or biological determinism.
Having reached a theoretical criticism of the terms on which
women might claim equality or difference from men in the field
of literature, feminist studies also confronted other issues in the
1980s. Deconstructionist readings of gender difference in texts
by men as well as women could lose sight of the real world, in
which women are paid less and are more likely to be victims of
sexual violence. With this in mind, some feminist critics
pursued links with Marxist or African American studies; gender
roles, like those of class and race, were interdependent systems
for registering the material consequences of people’s
differences. It no longer seemed so easy to say what the term
“women” referred to, when the interests of different kinds of
women had been opposed to each other. African American

women asked if feminism was really their cause, when white
women had so long enjoyed power over both men and women of
their race and when the early women’s movement largely
ignored the experience and concerns of women of color. In a
classic Marxist view, women allied with men of their class
rather than with women of other classes. It became more
difficult to make universal claims about women’s literature, as
the horizon of the college-educated North American feminists
expanded to recognize the range of conditions of women and of
literature worldwide. Intersectional feminist criticism concerns
itself with race, class, and nationality, as well as gender, and
the way these differences shape each other and intersect in the
experience and representation of particular individuals and
groups.
Gender Studies and Queer Theory
From the 1970s, feminists sought recognition for lesbian writers
and lesbian culture, which they felt had been even less visible
than male homosexual writers and gay culture. Concurrently,
feminist studies abandoned the simple dualism of male/ female,
part of the very binary logic of patriarchy that seemed to cause
the oppression of women. Thus feminists recognized a zone of
inquiry, the study of gender, as distinct from historical studies
of women, and increasingly they included masculinity as a
subject of investigation. As gender studies turned to
interpretation of the text in ideological context regardless of the
sex or intention of the author, it incorporated the ideas of
French philosopher Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality
(1976). Foucault (1926–84) helped show that there was nothing
natural, universal, or timeless in the constructions of sexual
difference or sexual practices. Foucault also historicized the
concept of homosexuality, which only in the later nineteenth
century came to be defined as a disease associated with a
distinctive personality type. Literary scholars began to study the
history of sexuality as a key to the shifts in modern culture that
had also shaped literature.
By the 1980s gender had come to be widely regarded as a

discourse that imposed binary social norms on human diversity.
Theorists such as Donna Haraway (b. 1944) and Judith Butler
(b. 1956) insisted further that sex and sexuality have no natural
basis; even the anatomical differences are representations from
the moment the newborn is put in a pink or blue blanket.
Moreover, these theorists claimed that gender and sexuality are
performative and malleable positions, enacted in many more
than two varieties. From cross-dressing to surgical sex changes,
the alternatives chosen by real people have influenced critical
theory and generated both writings and literary criticism about
those writings. Perhaps biographical and feminist studies face
new challenges when identity seems subject to radical change
and it is less easy to determine the sex of an author.
Gay and lesbian literary studies have included practices that
parallel those of feminist criticism. At times critics identify
oppressive or positive representations of homosexuality in
works by men or women, gay, lesbian, or straight. At other
times critics seek to establish the equivalent stature of a work
by a gay or lesbian writer or, because these identities tended to
be hidden in the past, to reveal that a writer was gay or lesbian.
Again stages of equality and difference have yielded to a
questioning of the terms of difference, in this case in what has
been called queer theory. The field of queer theory hopes to
leave everyone guessing rather than to identify gay or lesbian
writers, characters, or themes. One of its founding texts,
Between Men (1985), by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009),
drew on structuralist insight into desire as well as
anthropological models of kinship to show that, in canonical
works of English literature, male characters form “homosocial”
(versus homosexual) bonds through their rivalry for and
exchange of a woman. Queer theory, because it rejects the idea
of a fixed identity or innate or essential gender, likes to
discover resistance to heterosexuality in unexpected places.
Queer theorists value gay writers such as Oscar Wilde, but they
also find queer implications regardless of the author’s
acknowledged identity. This approach emphasizes not the

surface signals of the text but the subtler meanings an audience
or receiver might detect. It encompasses elaborate close reading
of many varieties of literary work; characteristically, a leading
queer theorist, D. A. Miller (b. 1948), has written in loving
detail about both Jane Austen and Broadway musicals.
African American and Ethnic Literary Studies
Critics sought to define an African American literary tradition
as early as the turn of the twentieth century. The 1920s Harlem
Renaissance produced some of the first classic essays on
writings by African Americans. Criticism and histories of
African American literature tended to ignore and dismiss
women writers, while feminist literary histories, guided by
Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own (1929),
neglected women writers of color. Only after feminist critics
began to succeed in the academy and African American studies
programs were established did the whiteness of feminist studies
and the masculinity of African American studies become
glaring; both fields have for some time worked to correct this
narrowness of vision, in part by learning from each other. The
study of African American literature followed the general
pattern that we have noted, first striving to claim equality, on
established aesthetic grounds, of works such as Ralph Ellison’s
magnificent Invisible Man (1952). Then in the 1960s the Black
Arts or Black Aesthetic emerged. Once launched in the
academy, however, African American studies has been devoted
less to celebrating an essential racial difference than to tracing
the historical construction of a racial Other and a subordinated
literature. The field sought to recover neglected genres such as
slave narratives and traced common elements in fiction or
poetry to the conditions of slavery and segregation. By the
1980s, feminist and poststructuralist theory had an impact in the
work of some African American critics such as Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. (b. 1950), Houston A. Baker, Jr. (b. 1943), and Hazel
V. Carby (b. 1948), while others objected that the doubts raised
by “theory” stood in the way of political commitment. African
Americans’ cultural contributions to America have gained much

more recognition than before. New histories of American
culture have been written with the view that racism is not an
aberration but inherent to the guiding narratives of national
progress. Many critics now regard race as a discourse with only
slight basis in genetics but with weighty investments in
ideology. This poststructuralist position coexists with
scholarship that takes into account the race of the author or
reader or that focuses on African American characters or
themes.
In recent years a series of fields has arisen in recognition of the
literatures of other American ethnic groups, large and small:
Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Chicanos.
Increasingly, such studies avoid romanticizing an original, pure
culture or assuming that these literatures by their very nature
undermine the values and power of the dominant culture.
Instead, critics emphasize the hybridity of all cultures in a
global economy. The contact and intermixture of cultures across
geographical borders and languages (translations, “creole”
speech made up of native and acquired languages, dialects) may
be read as enriching literature and art, despite being caused by
economic exploitation. In method and in aim these fields have
much in common with African American studies, though each
cultural and historical context is very different. Each field
deserves the separate consideration that we cannot offer here.
• • •
Not so very long ago, critics might have been charged with a
fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of literature if they
pursued matters considered the business of sociologists,
matters—such as class, race, sexuality, and gender—that
seemed extrinsic to the text. The rise of the above-noted fields
has made it standard practice for critics to address questions
about class, race, sexuality, and gender in placing a text, its
source, and its reception in historical and ideological context.
One brief example might illustrate the way Marxist, feminist,
queer, and African American criticism can contribute to a
literary reading.

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was first
produced in 1947 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Its
acclaim was partly due to its fashionable blend of naturalism
and symbolism: The action takes place in a shabby tenement on
an otherworldly street, Elysian Fields—in an “atmosphere of
decay” laced with “lyricism,” as Williams’s stage directions put
it (1.1). After the Depression and World War II, American
audiences welcomed a turn away from world politics into the
psychological core of human sexuality. This turn to ostensibly
individual conflict was a kind of alibi for at least two sets of
issues that Williams and middle-class theatergoers in New York
and elsewhere sought to avoid. First are racial questions that
relate to ones of gender and class: What is the play’s attitude to
race, and what is Williams’s attitude? Biography seems
relevant, though not the last word on what the play means.
Williams’s family had included slaveholding cotton growers,
and he chose to spend much of his adult life in the South, which
he saw as representing a beautiful but dying way of life. He was
deeply attached to women in his family who might be models
for the brilliant, fragile, cultivated Southern white woman,
Blanche DuBois. Blanche (“white” in French), representative of
a genteel, feminine past that has gambled, prostituted,
dissipated itself, speaks some of the most eloquent lines in the
play when she mourns the faded Delta plantation society.
Neither the playwright nor his audience wished to deal with
segregation in the South, a region that since the Civil War had
stagnated as a kind of agricultural working class in relation to
the dominant North—which had its racism, too.
The play scarcely notices race. The main characters are white.
The cast includes a “Negro Woman” as servant and a blind
Mexican woman who offers artificial flowers to remember the
dead, but these figures seem more like props or symbols than
fully developed characters. Instead, racial difference is
transposed into ethnic and class difference in the story of a
working-class Pole intruding into a family clinging to French
gentility. Stella warns Blanche that she lives among

“heterogeneous types” and that Stanley is “a different species”
(1.1). The play thus transfigures contemporary anxieties about
miscegenation, as the virile (black) man dominates the ideal
white woman and rapes the spirit of the plantation South. A
former soldier who works in a factory, Stanley represents as
well the defeat of the old, agricultural economy by
industrialization.
The second set of issues that neither the playwright nor his
audience confronts directly is the disturbance of sexual and
gender roles that would in later decades lead to movements for
women’s and gay rights. It was well-known in New Orleans at
least that Williams was gay. In the 1940s he lived with his
lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales, in the French Quarter.
Like many homosexual writers in other eras, Williams recasts
homosexual desire in heterosexual costume. Blanche,
performing femininity with a kind of camp excess, might be a
fading queen pursuing and failing to capture younger men.
Stanley, hypermasculine, might caricature the object of desire
of both men and women as well as the anti-intellectual, brute
force in postwar America. His conquest of women (he had “the
power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens”
[1.1]) appears to be biologically determined. By the same token
it seems natural that Stanley and his buddies go out to work and
that their wives are homemakers in the way now seen as typical
of the 1950s. In this world, artists, homosexuals, or unmarried
working women like Blanche would be both vulnerable and
threatening. Blanche, after all, has secret pleasures—drinking
and sex—that Stanley indulges in openly. Blanche is the one
who is taken into custody by the medical establishment, which
in this period diagnosed homosexuality as a form of insanity.
New Historicism
Three interrelated schools of historical and ideological criticism
have been important innovations in the past two decades. These
are part of the swing of the pendulum away from formal
analysis of the text and toward historical analysis of context.
New historicism has less obvious political commitments than

Marxism, feminism, or queer theory, but it shares their interest
in the power of discourse to shape ideology. Old historicism, in
the 1850s–1950s, confidently told a story of civilization’s
progress from a Western point of view; a historicist critic would
offer a close reading of the plays of Shakespeare and then locate
them within the prevailing Elizabethan “worldview.” “New
Historicism,” labeled in 1982 by Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943),
rejected the technique of plugging samples of a culture into a
history of ideas. Influenced by poststructuralist anthropology,
New Historicism tried to offer a multilayered impression or
“thick description” of a culture at one moment in time,
including popular as well as elite forms of representation. As a
method, New Historicism belongs with those that deny the unity
of the text, defy the authority of the source, and license the
receiver—much like deconstructionism. Accordingly, New
Historicism doubts the accessibility of the past, insisting that all
we have is discourse. One model for New Historicism was the
historiography of Michel Foucault, who insisted on the power of
discourses—that is, not only writing but all structuring myths or
ideologies that underlie social relations. The New Historicist,
like Foucault, is interested in the transition from the external
powers of the state and church in the feudal order to modern
forms of power. The rule of the modern state and middle-class
ideology is enforced insidiously by systems of surveillance and
by each individual’s internalization of discipline.
No longer so “new,” New Historicism has helped to produce a
more narrative and concrete style of criticism even among those
who espouse poststructuralist and Marxist theories. A New
Historicist article begins with an anecdote, often a description
of a public spectacle, and teases out the many contributing
causes that brought disparate social elements together in that
way. It usually applies techniques of close reading to forms that
would not traditionally have received such attention. Although
it often concentrates on events several hundred years ago, in
some ways it defies historicity, flouting the idea that a complete
objective impression of the entire context could ever be

achieved.
Cultural Studies
Popular culture often gets major attention in the work of New
Historicists. Yet today most studies of popular culture would
acknowledge their debt instead to cultural studies, as filtered
through the now-defunct Center for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and others
at the University of Birmingham in England. Method, style, and
subject matter may be similar in New Historicism and cultural
studies: Both attend to historical context, theoretical method,
political commitment, and textual analysis. But whereas the
American movement shares Foucault’s paranoid view of state
domination through discourse, the British school, influenced by
Raymond Williams and his concept of “structures of feeling,”
emphasizes the way that ordinary people, the receivers of
cultural forms, can and do resist dominant ideology. The
documents examined in a cultural-studies essay may be recent,
such as artifacts of tourism at Shakespeare’s birthplace, rather
than sixteenth-century maps. Cultural studies today influences
history, sociology, communications and media, and literature
departments; its studies may focus on television, film, romance
novels, and advertising, or on museums and the art market,
sports and stadiums, New Age religious groups, or other forms
and practices.
The questions raised by cultural studies might encourage a critic
to place a poem like Marge Piercy’s Barbie Doll in the context
of the history of that toy, a doll whose slender, impossibly long
legs, tiptoe feet (not unlike the bound feet of Chinese women of
an earlier era), small nose, and torpedo breasts epitomized a
1950s ideal of the female body. A critic influenced by cultural
studies might align the poem with other works published around
1973 that express feminist protest concerning cosmetics, body
image, consumption, and the objectification of women, while
she or he would draw on research into the creation, marketing,
and use of Mattel toys. The poem reverses the Sleeping Beauty
story: This heroine puts herself into the coffin rather than

waking up. The poem omits any hero—Ken?—who would rescue
her. “Barbie Doll” protests the pressure a girl feels to fit into a
heterosexual plot of romance and marriage; no one will buy her
if she is not the right toy or accessory.
Indeed, accessories such as “GE stoves and irons” (line 3)
taught girls to plan their lives as domestic consumers, and
Barbie’s lifestyle is decidedly middle-class and suburban
(everyone has a house, car, pool, and lots of handbags). The
whiteness of the typical “girlchild” (1) goes without saying.
Although Mattel produced Barbie’s African American friend,
Christie, in 1968, Piercy’s title makes the reader imagine
Barbie, not Christie. In 1997 Mattel issued Share a Smile
Becky, a friend in a wheelchair, as though in answer to the
humiliation of the girl in Piercy’s poem, who feels so deformed,
in spite of her “strong arms and back, / abundant sexual drive
and manual dexterity” (8–9), that she finally cripples herself.
The icon, in short, responds to changing ideology. Perhaps
responding to generations of objections like Piercy’s, Barbies
over the years have been given feminist career goals, yet
women’s lives are still plotted according to physical image.
In this manner a popular product might be “read” alongside a
literary work. The approach would be influenced by Marxist,
feminist, gender, and ethnic studies, but it would not be driven
by a desire to destroy Barbie as sinister, misogynist propaganda.
Piercy’s kind of protest against indoctrination has gone out of
style. Girls have found ways to respond to such messages and
divert them into stories of empowerment. Such at least is the
outlook of cultural studies, which usually affirms popular
culture. A researcher could gather data on Barbie sales and
could interview girls or videotape their play in order to
establish the actual effects of the dolls. Whereas traditional
anthropology examined non-European or preindustrial cultures,
cultural studies may direct its fieldwork, or ethnographic
research, inward, at home. Nevertheless, many contributions to
cultural studies rely on methods of textual close reading or
Marxist and Freudian literary criticism developed in the mid-

twentieth century.
Postcolonial Criticism and Studies of World Literature
In the middle of the twentieth century, the remaining colonies
of the European nations struggled toward independence. French-
speaking Frantz Fanon (1925–61) of Martinique was one of the
most compelling voices for the point of view of the colonized or
exploited countries, which like the feminine Other had been
objectified and denied the right to look and talk back. Edward
Said (1935–2003), in Orientalism (1978), brought
poststructuralist analysis to bear on the history of colonization,
illustrating the ways that Western culture feminized and
objectified the East. Postcolonial literary studies developed into
a distinct field in the 1990s in tandem with globalization and
the replacement of direct colonial power with international
corporations and NGOs (nongovernmental agencies such as the
World Bank). In general this field cannot share the optimism of
cultural studies, given the histories of slavery and economic
exploitation of colonies and the violence committed in the name
of civilization and progress. Studies by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (b. 1942) and Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) have further
mingled Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist theory to re-
read both canonical Western works and the writings of
marginalized peoples. Colonial or postcolonial literatures may
include works set or published in countries during colonial rule
or after independence, or they may feature texts produced in the
context of international cultural exchange, such as a novel in
English by a woman of Chinese descent writing in Malaysia.
Like feminist and queer studies and studies of African American
or other ethnic literatures, postcolonial criticism is inspired by
recovery of neglected works, redress of a systematic denial of
rights and recognition, and increasing realization that the
dualisms of opposing groups reveal interdependence. In this
field the stage of difference came early, with the celebrations of
African heritage known as Négritude, but the danger of that
essentialist claim was soon apparent: The Dark Continent or
wild island might be romanticized and idealized as a source of

innate qualities of vitality long repressed in Enlightened
Europe. Currently, most critics accept that the context for
literature in all countries is hybrid, with immigration and
educational intermixing. Close readings of texts are always
linked to the author’s biography and literary influences and
placed within the context of contemporary international politics
as well as colonial history. Many fiction writers, from Salman
Rushdie (b. 1947) to Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967) and Zadie Smith
(b. 1975), make the exploration of cultural mixture or hybridity
central to their work, whether in a pastiche of Charles Dickens
or a story of an Indian family growing up in New Jersey and
returning as tourists to their supposed “native” land.
Poststructuralist theories of trauma, and theories of the
interrelation of narrative and memory, provide explanatory
frames for interpreting writings from Afghanistan to Zambia.
Studies of postcolonial culture retain a clear political mission
that feminist and Marxist criticism have found difficult to
sustain. Perhaps this is because the scale of the power relations
is so vast, between nations rather than the sexes or classes
within those nations. Imperialism can be called an absolute evil,
and the destruction of local cultures a crime against humanity.
Today some of the most exciting literature in English emerges
from countries once under the British Empire, and all the
techniques of criticism will be brought to bear on it.
• • •
If history is any guide, in later decades some critical school will
attempt to read the diverse literatures of the early twenty-first
century in pure isolation from authorship and national origin, as
self-enclosed form. The themes of hybridity, indeterminacy,
trauma, and memory will be praised as universal. It is even
possible that readers’ continuing desire to revere authors as
creative geniuses in control of their meanings will regain
respectability among specialists. The elements of the literary
exchange—text, source, and receiver—are always there to
provoke questions that generate criticism, which in turn
produces articulations of the methods of that criticism. It is an

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